Draft:Erhard Grosskopf
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Erhard Grosskopf is a German composer.
After beginning various courses in medicine, mathematics, philosophy, church music and composition with Ernst Pepping and Boris Blacher and then working as a lecturer for two years at the Berlin Conservatory, Grosskopf has lived in Berlin as a freelance composer since 1966. He was a scholarship holder at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1966/67 and 1977 and worked repeatedly in the Electronic Studio for Sonology at the University of Utrecht, and later also at the ZKM Karlsruhe. In 1972 his electronic music Process of Change was awarded the Prix d’Italia. From 1976 to 1979 he was co-editor of the magazine for culture and politics Berliner Hefte, and from 1978 to 1998 he was the initiator and artistic director of the concert series Insel Musik in Berlin. From 1982 to 1992 he received invitations to lecture at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt.
Grosskopf had already addressed the dimension of space in music in the 1960s. Among other things, in 1969 he created an instrumental-electronic 7-channel composition for the German spherical pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka (Dialectics) and in 1971 Hörmusik, the first spatial composition composed for the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, about which Heinz-Klaus Metzger said 30 years later on Deutschlandradio Kultur: "The space that this score is about is not the space in which it is realized, but the other way round, the space that it realizes; it creates it compositionally."
A much-discussed performance of his ballet Lichtknall took place in 1987 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (direction and image by Achim Freyer, choreography by Lucinda Childs). This was followed in 1993 by the world premiere of the symphony Zeit der Windstille (commissioned by the SFB/rbb, International Jury Selection of the ISCM for the World Music Days ’95) and in 2003 by the commission of MaerzMusik, the Plejaden – Seven Similar Pieces for Piano and Orchestra, as well as the orchestral work Widerschein at the rbb, Music of the Present in the same year.
Grosskopf has been a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin since 1994[1] and was deputy director from 2003 to 2008.[2] and then director of the music section until May 2012.[3]